Technology has caught up with the world of undercover spies – a quick Google and any agent’s cover would be blown – and thus the Legends program was created. People were recruited to serve as covers – their careers would be helped along, they would be encouraged not to make any serious relationships and at some point, they would go to an airport, swap places with their counterpart agent. The agent assumes their identity and history and the recruit disappears until the operation is over.

But when Jamie Tulloch arrives in Paris to switch places with Agent GARNET, he finds their handler murdered and when there is no sign of GARNET, Jamie makes a fateful decision – to head out on the mission himself. And while he may be the perfect person to impersonate himself, the lack of any sort of training or experience might just kill him – and it’s much, much more than his life that is at stake…

Sorry the blog’s been a bit quiet these past couple of weeks. Work has been extremely hectic and the combination of that and a bad back has kind of distracted me, both in reading and blogging. The whole month has been pretty slow – four reviews so far, but there are some in the pipeline.

A Reluctant Spy is the first book by David Goodman – he spoke at Stockport Noir and the book sounded intriguing, so I thought I’d give it a go. And it’s pretty good – it won the McDermid Debut Award at the Theakston Crime Fiction Festivsal – if you like this sort of thing.

Ah, this is tricky to review. I can see the quality – the tale switches between Jamie, Nicola (the trained agent who has to work with Jamie) and Jeremy, the person behind the Legends program who really could do with having a more different name from Jamie, but thankfully, as he doesn’t leave London, dealing with a huge data breach, this old fluff-brained reviewer didn’t get confused too many times.

It’s very well-written and held my attention – Jamie and Nicola in particular were interesting characters – but at the end of the day, this isn’t my genre unless there’s also a mystery involved. There are two primary villains to be unmasked, one of which would have been more of a surprise if they weren’t involved and the other… well, it wasn’t presented as a mystery, just picking someone out of a selection of characters to be guilty.

But that isn’t the point of this sort of story. It’s the intrigue, the tension and the action and the book handles all that very well. It’s definitely a series that I might well return to at some point, possibly very soon, but if you’re looking for a mystery, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. Still, if you want a spy thriller, why not give it a go?